Teenager Frank Cauldhame has no National Insurance number, no birth certificate and has been told by his overprotective father to lie should anyone ask who he is. Who you can trust, if anyone, is hard to know. After seeing events and actions from one character’s viewpoint and believing them, Lotz then presents you with another character’s version of the same events. This dark story of four plane crashes and the three children who survive plays with unreliable narration in quite a different way, as diary entries, extracts of a book, news reports and psychiatric reports make up the puzzle pieces of the plot. A punch of a twist – excuse the pun – reveals both characters to be completely unreliable. This becomes Project Mayhem, an army with the aim of bringing the whole system down. When the unnamed, insomniac narrator meets the enigmatic Tyler Durden, the two men start an underground boxing club for men who feel they want to be defined by more than their jobs and pay grades. Unreliable narrators go hand in hand with plot twists and never so much as here. The twist wasn’t what I loved most about this book – it was the slow reveals in the first section from Nick about himself, that turned him from immediate protagonist to somewhat tarnished hero. The fabulously unpleasant tale of Amy and Nick’s marital problems breathed new life into the psychological thriller. Here are a few of the ones that stand out for me. There are, of course, different types of unreliable narrators those who are fooling themselves, those who are fooling others, and a range in between. Fertile ground, because let’s face it, good people make for really dull stories. And that’s a fun pit to play in for a writer. After all, it’s in the situations when we’re acting at our most shameful – cheating on a partner, sleeping with someone else’s partner, or secretly fighting to keep a spouse, that our versions of the truth are the most tenuous. An affair combined with a marriage built on secrets – which there must be in a thriller – is perfect for creating unreliable narrators. My novel Behind Her Eyes is, on the surface, the story of the three people in a love affair.

I don’t mind a narrator who’s self-deceiving, but the clues for their truth have to be there for the reader to see. No one likes being outright lied to, even in fiction. The only rule I have in how I let characters tell stories is that they must always tell the reader their version of the truth. Any truth is, after all, just a matter of perspective.

The way I see it, we’re all unreliable narrators of our lives who usually have absolute trust in our self-told stories. T he unreliable narrator is an odd concept.

Unreliable narrator examples